Jagmohan Joshi

London

1958–79

Jagmohan Joshi was born in Hoshiarpur, India in 1937. In 1958, aged 21, Joshi migrated to Britain to train as an accountant. He moved to Birmingham and worked in Handsworth Dairies. Joshi had long been a Communist and soon after his migration joined the Birmingham Communist Party. He had connections with Avtar Jouhl, who he supported to organize a union at his foundry by introducing Jouhl to his contacts in the Birmingham Communist Party. This marked the start of a lifelong working relationship.

In 1959, together with Jouhl, Joshi founded the Birmingham branch of the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA). This involved making connections with the South Staffordshire branch of the IWA, which had an office in Wolverhampton, and then putting a case to the national committee in London for the need to establish a branch in the Smethwick area. His earliest work included organizing a lobby of Parliament against impending immigration laws by preparing a memorandum titled ‘Victim’s Speak’ with the support of the Indian High Commission. In addition, in 1964 he facilitated a trip by the civil rights activist Malcolm X to Smethwick with Jouhl, where Conservative MP Peter Griffiths’ racist campaign had recently taken place and where colour bars were in operation in pubs and housing.

In 1961 Joshi along with sports journalist and anti-racist activist Maurice Ludmer founded an umbrella organization named the Co-ordinating Committee Against Racial Discrimination (CCARD), after a meeting in Digbeth with the West Indian Workers' Association and the Indian Youth League. Shirley Fossick, who met Joshi at a University of Birmingham Student Union event, was active in CCARD as the Campaign Secretary. She would eventually marry Joshi. CCARD notably organized the first major campaign against the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, on the grounds that it was racially discriminatory. CCARD brought together several organizations, including the West Indian Gazette and Pakistani Workers’ Association, and worked to build connections with the US civil rights movement and the British Black Panthers.

In 1967 the IWA split and Joshi, along with Jouhl, led IWA (GB), which favoured a revolutionary approach that was independent of state institutions. Joshi became increasingly critical of the British Communist Party, and his advocacy included calls for a separate trade union for racialized minority workers.

In April 1968 Joshi, in his capacity as General Secretary of the IWA (GB), organized a meeting of anti-racist leaders in Leamington Spa, at a home that had been targeted by right-wing extremists, under the new banner of the Black People’s Alliance (BPA). The BPA brought together fifty South Asian, African and Caribbean organizations to resist racism through militant action. The steering committee, headed by Joshi, also included Roy Sawh and Abdul Martin, President of the National Federation of Pakistani Associations in Britain. Joshi continued to develop strong connections with the Black Power movement and, according to the historian Rob Waters, successfully articulated a particular notion of Blackness that connected all those subject to British colonization, in turn highlighting the intersections between South Asian radical action and the Black Power Movement.

On 3 June 1979, during a rally against racism in London which was attended by 4,000 people, Joshi suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 42 years old.